I wish I could have known you.

In my haste, I failed to see the error in my logic. I also was led astray by poor white space formatting. Basically, I turned this

into this

when what I wanted was this (</mt:Else>s omitted)

Here’s everything together.

A few days or weeks or hours after restructuring the main page for this blog, I noticed that the layout for blog entries that chronologically come between bits posts were not closing. The result was that blog entries that did not start a day’s posts would be contained in the same container as bits posts written later that day. The visual representation of date relationships was broken, though the information was there for anyone to see.

I went after this bug yesterday»8 months later!« and also fixed the absence of JavaScript to bits archives. Here is the in-production MultiBlog stanza for this page.

The textarea above is 50 lines tall, so the last five lines (45-49»because line 41 wraps«) are what’s new.

There’s something that needs to be said for bugs and bug fixes. While perhaps not as consequential as, say, footnotes are to the textual unconscious»MaryAnn N., a friend of mine in the French department circa 1996, intepreted notes, errata, and other editorializations of a text as a the unconscious of a text. In some ways, bugs as a form of textual unconscious may have more in common with the Freudian unconscious proper because bugs obscure a portion of a text’s intent, deforming it to produce an error. Additionally, bugs work best when they’re replaced/eliminated/suppressed. «, bugs do significantly alter authorial intent in a way that can be compared to the way unconscious impulses deform expression in parapraxes»Freudian slips«.

Keep an eye on the sidebar.

On Thursday, 13 May, a few of the tech team»and HR« at my work took cabs to Dong Baek, located in the Tenderloin’s northeastern section.1

Lunch was great, better than I expected.2 I had seafood 짬뽕»Jjamppong«, which wasn’t as spicy as the double-chilies on the menu promised. The 반찬»banchan« was delicious.

The trip out and the meal itself took more time than Jeffrey and I had to make our next meeting. We settled the table’s bill (fast) and when we hit the street, good ol’ 38 Geary was trundling to the stop right in front of the restaurant.

All aboard and there we were, smack in the back with a crew running a shell game. Who could have guessed we’d find a shell game in the middle of a lunchtime bus commute to SF’s financial district?

The operator kept trying to pull us, Leslie especially, into the game. The first time Leslie found the pea, the operator tendered a C-spot her way. Leslie declined, too polite, wary, and well-paid to go for the bait. The operator tried a few more times with smaller bills. I breathed a thousand sighs of relief when we’d gotten to Third and Market, one stop early but close enough to hoof it.

Our last stop was a yogurt shop on either Kearny or Montgomery, but I’d had plenty to eat for lunch.

This image makes me think of how we’re split in so many different directions, if only through technology we could do everything at once, in slices of time each smaller than the other, the abundant side of Zeno’s paradox for the impossibly quick and irreparably divided.

The sense is found in the last 46 seconds»« of Richard D. James’s Girl/Boy Song. Having swept through seven movements in four minutes, the track’s composer»As in the song’s analogue for prose’s narrator and poetry’s speaker.« tries to complete—desperately, futilely—what cannot be completed. As if time had run out, as if compression were failing, as if things were coming to an end.

I’m reminded of Kali, The Black One, an apparition of annihilation and time.

It is time to start shouting.

Representatives and appointees of the Obama administration—particularly David Axelrod and Attorney General Erich H. Holder—are considering abridging one of the most important Supreme Court interpretations of the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination, designed to protect US citizens from (trial) abuses by law enforcement and the judiciary. Alexrod said to CNN that President

I have no idea what kind of adjustments the Obama administration is considering regarding the Fifth Amendment and I don’t care.

All US citizens, native and naturalized, deserve equal protection under the law and the full exercise of their Constitutional Rights. Once Constitutional protections have been removed for one group of US citizens, the Constitutional rights of all US citizens will fall more easily. The only remaining question will be when will the government find it convenient and expedient to abridge those rights.

Holder should relinquish office immediately, as he has proven himself unfit to serve the citizens of the United States.

I really want this thing to work out with President Obama. He’s smart. He’s a constitutaional scholar. His adminstration has taken steps to advance the welfare of US citizens and the welfare of people worldwide. So I don’t get what’s going on with his bizarre warning regarding information as a distraction. In his commencement speech at Hamptom University»an HBC«, Obama

Obama’s words seem utterly bizarre to me. It’s as if he’s warning us that LOLCats, the Tron Guy, and RickRolling will inhibit one‘s political and social awareness, as if people who use Twitter, Facebook, and 4Chan are wasting their energies by not participating in democratic politics.

All of which is absurd»Facebook users can be political, right?«, so I guess it’s OK he said what he did in a commencement speech.

It’s not as if the Internet can assist people attempting to get information to the outside world about their own democratic process or as if text messages can be used to help earthquake survivors locate emergency assistance and to notify rescue workers of their location. Or maybe Obama»and his speech writers« forgot that the Internet is great for giving the lie to political posturing.1

While any information channel, of which the Internet is one, can be used to scam, proselytize, and hypnotize, it can also be used, to inform, impassion, and organize as well. In my opinion, the distractions Obama warned of in his 2010 commencement speech to Hamptom University graduates is a misguided swipe at what is most succinctly characterized as culture. These distractions—the badger-mushrooms and All Your Bases—are transient, trivial, enduring, sublime, and cacaphonous. They are junk, art, monuments, and stuff, and they come fully blown through the Internet.

I loved celebrating Cinco de Mayo when before leaving California for the University of Virginia in Fall 1993. Because I was unaware of the historical significance of the holiday, Cinco de Mayo was a low-pressure excuse to have a barbecue, to drink one too many Margaritas and to acknowledge the value of Mexican culture»Yes, Mexican a la Gringo, but acknowledgement nonetheless.« and heritage.

Two years into the twenty-first century, I was really missing me some California rituals, so organized a Cinco de Mayo party at my friend Tom’s house. We had Maggies»Using this very recipe.« and quesadillas with my special homemade guacomole and salsa. It was a lovely Charlottesville spring day with a few of my closest friends»Was that a twinge of nostalgia?!«.

I found an article explaining the historical significance of Cinco de Mayo and read it to everyone like the nerd I am. The punchline for us Americanos is

The commercialization and focus on inebration hit me in the inbox this morning. Yelp’s email to me was essentially a how-to on alcohol-induced vomiting.

I’m sure this skeletal framework for sponsor recommendations distills the narrative arc of half a hundred SF hipsters on Cinco de Mayo and practically every other weekend night»I put on my robe and curmudgeon hat.«.

Still, it is our Cinco de Mayo, and I’m glad/relieved/ecstatic to observe it while living in California, the only home I’ve ever known.

I’ve been working with Save PDF to Yojimbo and Yojimbo Collection From Front Window for just a little over a month and I’ve experienced some weird glitches. The most difficult of these glitches seems to happen when I have a substantial number (about a dozen) of tabs open and I try to use Yojimbo Collection from Front Window. The front Safari window becomes unresponsive and cannot be closed. The only solution is to quit Safari»No, I have not checked the logs.«.

A month of using these two scripts has also proved to me that scripting the GUI is slow. When dealing with, literally, thousands of RSS items a week, saving interesting/useful/compelling/curious/funny web pages to PDF takes a lot of time. Even if one doesn’t read all the items. It was enough to make me want to go back to poor neglected-by-its-developer Webnote.

What finally motivated me to augment my script repertoire was the fact that ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/ stands at 418.4 MB»In base-10 Finder.« and 6 GB/year seems excessive commitment to MobileMe»Another part of this set up which I find dissatisfying, but you gotta have the cloud somewhere, no?«.

So, I revised the two Yojimbo scripts I’ve been using this past month to transmit bookmarks, instead of PDFs, to Yojimbo. No more GUI scripting. These scripts are fast! I also improved the single-item-to-Yojimbo script so that it excludes Yojimbo collections whose names match the pattern of a collection name generated by Yojimbo Collection from Front Window »For those of us who create so many collections we don’t have time enough to browse, let alone rename, them.«.

No more pesky PDF Service. Assign any keyboard shortcut you want. Get ’em while they’re hot! Add Bookmark to Yojimbo and Yojimbo Bookmark Collection From Front Window.

I also updated Save PDF to Yojimbo with cullCollectionList.

As a former academic and currently unaffiliated researcher, I feel fairly compelled to meticulously and comprehensively document my reading, including my online web reading. Years ago, I made the shift to RSS and began using client-side bookmarking software and Delicious to compile the history of the web items I encountered. The problem with such a system? Link rot.

Despite owning a license to Yojimbo 1.0 since January 2007 when Tinderbox licenses began including a license for Yojimbo, I didn’t use Yojimbo. Adding items manually to a database app»Wherey by “manually” I mean using a GUI as opposed to a keyboard.« defeats the whole purpose of quick additions to a repository. I was also uncomfortable with the idea of having a database tied to single machine and I hadn’t yet begun taking advantage of MobileMe syncing.

My interest in Yojimbo picked up when I began considering tag-based filing systems. My results were uneven, and I came to the conclusion that I wished OS X had a database filing management system built in. (Yeah, my hopes were dashed when Apple scrubbed their plans for ZFS.)

In late fall of last year, I started playing earnestly with Yojimbo and in mid-January of this year I imported all two-thousand plus of my Delicious bookmarks into Yojimbo»I was also fed up with Webnote’s eternal beta status and persisent refusal to quit except when forced.«. Over the next few weeks, I infrequenly used Yojimbo to store new data, so strong were my filing habits.

It wasn’t until March that I realized I could get away from the software that had been plaguing me as well as solving the problem of link rot slowly transforming my carefully curated bookmarks into a steaming heap of 404s: I could use Yojimbo to store PDFs of those web pages that interested me.

In my free time I developed two collections of AppleScripts that help me archive PDFs to Yojimbo: 1) Add to Yojimbo and its companion PDF service, Save PDF to Yojimbo and 2) Yojimbo Collection From Front Window and its companion PDF service, Save PDF to Yojimbo Collection.

Both Add to Yojimbo and Yojimbo Collection From Front Window contain substantial comments that explain how they work. Of the two scripts, I think Yojimbo Collection From Front Window is the more potentially useful. Yojimbo Collection From Front Window creates a new note item and a PDF archive item for every open tab in Safari's frontmost window and adds them to a new folder collection. I use it to collect multi-page web articles into a single Yojimbo collection, to collect and associate web pages for later reference, to collect an article and its expanded images into a group, etc. Both scripts allow for on-page text selections and will save those selections to the newly created Yojimbo items’ “Comments” sections, this along with other metadata including tags, URLs, and user-supplied notes.

Tinkerers and AppleScripters will want to look inside to see the features and shortcomings of my scripts»Improvements welcome.«.

The rest of us will want to put the PDF services (the files with “PDF” in their titles) in ~/Library/PDF Services and assign a keyboard shortcut to those services. To use my scripts out-of-the-box, those shortcuts should be Control-Option P for Save PDF to Yojimbo Collection and Command-Control-Option P Save PDF to Yojimbo. I restricted these keyboard shortcuts to the applications in which I expect to invoke my scripts, namely, Safari and NetNewsWire.

The next step is to save the main scripts somewhere where you can get at them. I keep mine in ~/Library/Scripts/Yojimbo/Add to Yojimbo.scpt and /Users/mrsquid/Library/Scripts/Safari/Yojimbo Collection From Front Window/Yojimbo Collection From Front Window.scpt. I then assign keyboard shortcuts to these AppleScripts using Keyboard Maestro. The shorcuts for these scripts aren’t restricted by my AppleScript code.

The main shortcoming of my scripts is that they script the GUI, which means that whichever app you’re saving PDFs from must remain frontmost until the script has done its work»Apple removed the ability to script saving URLs as PDFs, breaking a useful non-GUI approach to saving PDFs from Safari. Lame.«. One of the main features of these scripts is that they both can be set to run with zero user-input (read the comments) and they also allow users to return to previous stages to modify tags, comments, and other metadata.

Keyboard jockeys keep in mind that Command-Return triggers the default button for multi-line text fields in AppleScript.

“Waterboarding” is a euphemism for a form of torture older than the United States itself. What makes the term “waterboarding” particularly grotesque is its winking reference to the American pastime of surfing. I’m reminded of the moment when Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) orders his soldiers to keep surfing during the onshore invasion of a Vietnamese encampment: Charlie don’t surf!. Kurtz’s Kilgore’s ejaculated command captures the ideology underlying the US invasion of Vietnam by characterizing Vietnamese as unable and unwilling to take part in the quintessentially American (by way of Hawaii) sport of surfing.

Still, it’s sometimes good to have things broken down in not-so-cultural-studiesesque analysis. Mark Benjamin does this when he writes

I cannot tell you how angry this makes me, angry that so many Americans were deceived into agreeing that waterboarding is a humane form of torture and angry that the Obama administration is not moving more quickly to close Guantanamo and that the sadists who authorized the use of torture are not being held accountable for their crimes.

I feel like a musky with all the fight gone out of him.»Jackson, Gordon. “Billy’s Girl.” Robert Shapard Ed. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. 1st ed. Salt Lake City: G.M. Smith, 1986: 180.« Last night I told one of our front desk clerks/security personnel that they keep me on a short leash, that eight hours a day is most of your life. Aaron replied, Most people don’t realize that and when they do, they’re blown away.

A couple days back an academic commented on Dynamic Anchors using Javascript and Tinderbox, and I (in part) replied

A few pointers on using my “tbx” PERL program.

I really do hope one day to flesh further the skeleton of how I use PERL, Tinderbox, and EndNote to publish to the web. For now, remunerated work isn’t leaving me much room for side research.

Donations welcome!

In July 2009, I notified my chair that I would not be returning to my job as a professor of literature. My departure was abrupt and left the department in the lurch. For that I am sorry. I am not sorry, however, about my decision to leave, one that had been years in the making. The short version (and all I’m likely to share unless you number among my friends or family) is that I write slowly and was unwilling to rush writing a book no one needed so that I could live longer in a place I did not love.

On 1 August 2009, Pam and I signed a one-year lease for an apartment in San Francisco’s Fillmore district. I’ve wanted to live in a city like this since going to college in Fall 1985 when I mistakenly thought L.A. would be such a city.

In October 2009, the bit of money I made in the sale of my house started running out, so I sold my Camry. For the first time since purchasing my first car in 1987, I did not own a motor vehicle, a condition to which I had been aspiring since 1993.

My 2009 holiday excursions over, I had depleted my sustaining funds by more than one month. I would run out of money in February as opposed to mid March. Pam had been telling me to expect in this economic climate that my job search would take two to four months.

I did and did not hear her; I was on vacation for the first time since 1990, on a five-month bus driver’s holiday that began in the second half of 2009. I got to work unimpeded on my favorite digital projects, this blog among them.

On 13 January, I started sending resumés to prospective employers and started receiving responses on 18 January. On 21 January, my first choice extended an offer for slightly more than I made at my last job (as a professor). The next day, I accepted.

Today is my first day, and the only thing I feel more than happy is lucky.